Grouping Students By Ability Growing In Popularity

Noting that the practice was considered to be a civil rights violation in recent decades, Education Week (3/27, Sparks) reports that "grouping students by academic ability seems to be back in vogue with a new generation of teachers, according to an analysis of federal teacher data" from the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy. Explaining that the practice consists of "separating students for instruction within a single class," the article adds, "In part, the new trend may be a generational issue: A majority of teachers in 2011 had not been in the field in the 1990s, when the debate over tracking and ability grouping was at its height." Education week reports that the practice began to be discouraged when "researchers found that, as in 'separate but equal' segregated schooling arrangements, students in lower academic groups and tracks were given less high-quality instruction and were not spurred to catch up with classmates in higher-level groups."